My partner blew out 49 candles Monday week ago and was immediately put into a hyperbaric chamber to re-oxygenate her blood. However, she recovered faster than Steve Irwin or Jacques Cousteau suffering the bends and was soon at her boxing class going hell for leather pounding the bag and doing her best Rocky Balboa impersonation - Yo, Adrian! It’s me, Rocky - for the better part of an hour. And on the Saturday night prior, I watched 63 year old Maureen dance non-stop for the best part of three hours and was not at all surprised to learn that she runs the 12 km City Bay "Fun" Run each year in well under an hour. And only bad weather last week forced South Australian Lynette Trott, 41, to abandon her push to summit Everest after she reached camp three at 7,700 metres.
Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.
49, 63 and 41 are just numbers, like 1 million, meaningless on their own, unless preceded with a $ sign or followed by the words "years old"! Increasingly, age is not perceived as a barrier to the achievement of physically demanding tasks. In fact, the fitter you are the better your performance in all life pursuits regardless of age. Does anyone remember Cliff Young, the potato farmer from Colac in NSW, who, in 1983, won the ultra marathon between Sydney and Melbourne, finishing the 1,000 km road race in 5 days, 15 hours, 4 minutes and 63 years of age?
Over the next quarter century, South Australia’s ageing population (65+) will grow three times as fast as the younger population. This has caused great consternation within social demographer circles and so our State Government has decided to act pro-actively by appointing, as its 20th Thinker in Residence, some dude who thinks a lot, particularly about getting old! I like this concept, in fact I’d love a job like that, to be paid to sit and think up stuff. Just to wear the title - Thinker in Residence - for a while would be reward enough but to also be paid at the rate of up to $1 million per year just to sit and think, would be stupendous! By the way, this is where the number 1 million actually means something.
How good would it look on your resume - Thinker in Residence? In fact, I think I’d be really very good at it. Give me a topic, any topic, and I’ll sit there ’in residence’ and think about it; truly I will, I promise to think about it, forsaking all other thoughts.
The term Thinker in Residence reminds me of Mr Bean, in the 1997 movie of the same name; when asked by his American hosts what his job entails as caretaker at Britain’s formidable Royal National Gallery he replies, "I get paid to sit and look at the paintings". So, a thinker in residence must be like the relationship between artist and muse with the artist being the thinker and the muse the subject of thought, which has me thinking about the athletic ladies on top again.
There is some recent research about the effect of high impact aerobic activity on children’s scholastic achievement. Err really? That would have nothing to do with increasing blood flow to that great scone in the sky, would it?
So the fitter you are the smarter you be. And how do we know this? We know this because some expert, (and we all know that an ’expert’ is a "has-been drip"), who is on the State Government payroll and gets paid an obscene sum of money to sit and think, told us so. My goodness, next they will be proffering the benefits of reintroducing mandatory physical education in schools.
So to you Julie, Maureen and Lynette, you will all be in the 65+ demographic in 25 years, so don’t sweat the small stuff, ignore the wacademics, and just keep doing it!
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Gary Hatwell
Executive Chairman
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Ps. we won’t be publishing an editorial next week on account of Her Majesty’s Birthday celebrations. However, our publishing team will produce another excellent feature article and we will also announce our footy tipping results and profile another of our EHP. I’ll be back in a fortnight - happy times until then!
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